Plural of γῆ and ὕλη

Plural Quantification and Classes

Plural Predication

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...

Vagueness and Plural Predication

This paper addresses the question of how to model the application of vague predicates like tall and bald to plural subjects like John and Mary and the men. In other words, we are interested in developing a logical analysis for natural language sentences like Mary is tall and The men are bald. In the past 30 years, much research has been devoted to finding the proper logical framework to model t...

Graphs of plural cuts

Plural (or multiple-conclusion) cuts are inferences made by applying a structural rule introduced by Gentzen for his sequent formulation of classical logic. As singular (singleconclusion) cuts yield trees, which underlie ordinary natural deduction derivations, so plural cuts yield graphs of a more complicated kind, related to trees, which this paper defines. Besides the inductive definition of ...

Mass nouns and plural logic

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian para...